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Overview
One hungry, hallucinatory night in the dark heart of Havana, Mano Rodriguez, a young doctor with the revolutionary medical service, comes to the aid of a teenage jinetera named Julia. She takes refuge in his clinic to break away from the abusive chulo who prostituted her, and they form an unlikely allegiance that Mano thinks might save him from his twin burdens: the dead-end hospital assignment he was delegated after being blacklisted by the Cuban Communist Party, and a Palo Monte curse on his love life commissioned by a vengeful ex-wife.
But when the pimp and his bodyguards come after Julia and Mano, the violent chain reaction plunges them all into the decadent catacombs of Havana’s criminal underworld . . .
“In the weeks before Hurricane Andrew sweeps down on Cuba in 1992, Dr. Mano Rodriguez is caught up in intrigue in this thoughtful, lushly detailed neo-noir.” —Publishers Weekly
“A sad, surreal, beautiful tour of the hell that was Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The writing is hypnotic, the storytelling superb. Havana Lunar is perfect.” —Tim McLoughlin, editor, Brooklyn Noir
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617750038 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Akashic Books |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2019 |
| Series: | The Cuban Noir Novels , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 201 |
| Sales rank: | 594,903 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
14 August 1992
It's Friday, and when I get back to the attic I see that Julia hasn't returned. I sit on the sofa, light a cigarette, and turn on the radio, tuning out the noise of the neighbors with the hollow metronome of Radio Reloj. "Did you know that good nutrition can be obtained from greens you can grow in your own solarium ...?" I don't want to be up in the hot attic with the tedious banter and the beginning of a migraine, so I go downstairs and let myself into the clinic to lie on a cot. When my grandmother Mamamá died, the Reforma Urbana "reallocated" the lower floors of my father's house: the first to a family from the provinces and the second to Beatrice, the block captain for the Comité de Defensa de la Revolución, whose eye, as the CDR symbol suggests, is always open. I had to set up a community polyclinic in the basement just to dig my heels in and hang onto the attic. Three weekends a month, legitimate cases of arthritis and herpes vie for attention with the usual complaints of mysterious pains and aches from patients who believe the only remedy is a shot of painkillers. It makes them feel a little better when they hold a doctor's attention. I listen, letting them speak for the adrenal rush it gives them, and then I explain for the thousandth time that it is the Special Period: There is no more morphine, not even aspirin.
Alone in the empty clinic at dusk, I am resting in one of the curtained compartments when a thunderstorm breaks the heat. The shower passes quickly, briefly taking my migraine away and leaving the street outside quiet, clean, and fragrant of motor oil and rotting leaves.
I am listening to the dripping trees when I hear the crack of glass. A gentle pressure like a cold hand causes the hairs on my neck to stand, and I experience a surge of obscure fright. I part the curtain to peer at the front door of the clinic, where a gloved hand reaches through a broken windowpane and releases the lock. ¿Qué carajo? It's common knowledge the neighborhood doctors don't have any more drugs, but a heavyset man in a dark overcoat is breaking into my clinic. He makes straight for the metal file cabinet, and I lie still, watching around the edge of the curtain. The man flips through the charts for a few minutes and leaves the clinic without taking anything, closing the door behind him. I go out through the alley and come around the front of the building to see him walking away up Calle 23. I follow him at a distance through the rain-slicked streets.
There is a hush over Havana. The moon, almost full, is rising above the bay. It is high summer, when the palms drop curled fronds that pile up on side-walks like brittle cigars. Sidestepping them, I keep the overcoat in sight. I follow the man up Infanta all the way to La Habana Vieja and down one of El Barrio Chino's narrow, nameless alleys. He disappears through an unnumbered entrance. No light leaks from the door glass, painted black.
I slip inside the corridor and push apart the dark drapes onto a small drinking establishment. A black bartender pours beer from a tap. Sitting at the bar with his back to me, the man in the overcoat says, "Give Doctor Rodriguez one on me." Surprised, I step out of the shadows. The man who broke into my clinic casts a glance over his shoulder to confirm my identity, looking blandly at the contusion beneath my right eye, a port-wine stain the size of a twenty-peso coin. His deep lines, pale complexion, silver hair, and mustache mark him as an autocrat of the Fidelista generation. The gray eyes and dark brow could almost be called handsome if his expression were not so stern and inscrutable. "Please have a seat, doctor. My name is Perez."
There is nobody else at the bar, but I keep an empty stool between us. "That's very humble of you, colonel. Anyone who reads Granma knows who you are."
"What will it be?" the bartender asks.
"Do you have wine?"
"I've just uncorked a very good five-year-old Chilean Cabernet." The bartender shows me the ornate label. "Or if you prefer I'm chilling an excellent Pinot Grigio de Venezia."
"The Cabernet will be fine, thanks."
The bartender places a glass before me and pours a generous serving. I take a taste, but the pounding of my heart and a sour flavor in my mouth keep me from enjoying it. "Tell me, Colonel Perez, what interest could the chief homicide investigator of the PNR possibly have in a pediatrician with the national medical service?"
He sips the fresh-poured beer. "I'm looking for a teenage girl wanted in connection with the murder of a chulo named Alejandro Martínez."
"¿Cómo?"
"The young woman in question spent a week at your apartment, and the victim came over and threatened both of you a few days before his body got tangled up in some fisherman's nets at the mouth of Havana Harbor."
"Could it have been accidental, a drowning?"
"There were signs of struggle: lesions on his arms and chest. Of course, the exact cause of death has been difficult to determine as we still haven't found his head."
"Carajo ..."
"He was not especially popular among the girls." Detective Perez takes off his gloves. His fingers are exquisitely manicured. Only once before, when I was starting medical school, have I seen such hands on a man. They belonged to the cadaver inside which I saw my first organs.
"Severing the cervical vertebrae requires both the right instrument and great force," I say, "not to mention a strong stomach and a lot of nerve. A girl couldn't have done that."
"Young ladies come from all over the island to work in Havana, doctor. Some will spend a few months, others a year or two, do a few dirty things, and usually they will go back to their villages and shack up with campesinos, have kids, lead normal lives. But there is another type. Surely you know the constitution: the solipsist. No matter what she gets in this life, she believes she deserves more." Perez swallows the last of his beer and rises to go. "If you see the girl again, I'd like you to contact me. Come back and talk to Samson, the bartender."
"You choose unusual locations to conduct your inquiries, colonel."
"Stay reachable for a few days, doctor. Don't leave Havana." Perez parts the drapes and is gone. I wait a minute before leaving, neglecting to finish my glass of wine. Samson does not look up.
I return home to Vedado and pull Aurora's old rocking chair close to the French doors, parting the curtains onto the corner of 12 y 23: the bored soldiers, the old Chevys, the people going by and, across the street, a black Toyota with dark windows, a curl of smoke emerging from the passenger side. Taking the service stairs down, I back the Lada out of the garage and leave it parked in the alley. When I check on the basement clinic, the broken window-pane has already been replaced.
CHAPTER 231 July 1992
Two weeks ago, my Friday shift at the pediatric hospital was almost over when Director González stepped around the curtain and handed me an envelope with my week's pay. "Rodriguez, you have tomorrow off, don't you?" Director González has always cultivated a studied, comfortable air toward my mark.
"Sí, señor."
"Would you stay over? Portuondo's bus was canceled."
"Sí, señor."
The admitting nurse briefed me on the next patient. "Una niña, ten years old, complaining of fever and an earache; high temperature, blurry vision, and slightly slurred speech."
Holding her mother's hand, the girl sat on a bench in the sala de examinación, a four-by-five compartment partitioned by plastic curtains strung up in the hot, drafty lobby. "First the earache," said the girl's mother. "Then the fever started. We waited a few days to come in."
"How many days, exactly, since the onset of the fever?"
"Four."
"Cuál es tu nombre, amiguita?"
"Me llamo Tonia."
I asked Tonia's mother, "Does your daughter have a speech impediment?"
"No."
"Tonia, can you tell me how many animals you count on the curtain there?"
"The light hurts." Her slur was pronounced. She focused on the mark beneath my right eye. "What's that on your face?"
"A bird dropped it on me." I turned and asked the mother, "Is anyone else with you?"
"My husband is in the waiting room."
My first task of the second shift was to convince Tonia's father that the girl's ailment was a lot more serious than a simple ear infection. Both of the girl's parents sat across from me at the desk I shared with four other pediatricians. "Your daughter has to stay here tonight."
The father stared suspiciously at my mark. "Come on, doctor. Just give the girl a shot and we'll be gone."
"She might have a cerebral abscess. She needs to be under close observation. This could require massive antibiotics."
"We live right around the corner in the Máximo Gomez apartments."
"You can spend the night in her room, if you'd like, but Tonia has to stay."
The father stood up and left the office, slamming the door behind him. The mother looked at me. "Do you have any children, doctor?"
"No," I said. I try to take care of every patient as if she were my own child, but to tell a parent this would just irritate the situation.
"If you let my baby die, you will be killing me too."
"I will do everything in my power to help your daughter."
"Imagine if your own mother had lost you, how she might feel."
There is no more powerful antidote than a mother's will for her child's survival. Sometimes this takes the form of a bitter pill, a country woman suspicious of all the gleaming machines and of their handlers, the doctors and nurses. Then there are those who trust modern practices. Either way it is a welcome medicine when a parent's stubbornness overpowers a child's fear.
I gave the nurse instructions to admit Tonia to intensive care and asked an orderly to set up a cot for the mother beside the girl's bed. Then I walked down the hall to the physician's lounge, a small, windowless closet with a bare bulb on the back wall and a dusty jug of water for refreshment. The coffee-maker had been stolen during the second week of my residency, and nobody had bothered filing a report because it had been a year since they had stocked coffee. Sometimes, in the middle of a double shift, I'll go there to stretch my legs across two plastic chairs and catch a short nap.
Tonia's father pushed the door open without knocking. "What are you doing in here?"
"Taking a siesta."
"Nothing is happening. Why can't I take my daughter home?"
"Please, get some sleep yourself. They made up an extra bed in her room."
"I don't like a bed. I sleep on a bench."
A nurse interrupted. "Doctor Rodriguez, venga pronto."
I pushed past the father and ran down the hall to Tonia's bed. I had been planning to order a CT scan in the morning, hoping there would still be time to go with a sequence of antimicrobials, but now Tonia's condition had become critical. The abscess was hemorrhaging. I told the head nurse to prep the OR for emergency surgery and went in to scrub up.
After the anesthesiologist put the girl under and the intern shaved the area over the abscess, I made an exploratory incision with the scalpel. Fortunately, I found the mass near the surface and completely encapsulated by membrane. Excision was completed quickly and without complications. I took a culture of the residual fluid with an aspirator and asked the intern to sew the patient up and send her on to post-op. Then I requisitioned the biopsy exam and wrote up a preliminary convalescing plan, treatment to be adjusted upon identification of the infecting microorganism.
By the end of the shift, Tonia was stable in the ICU. I informed Tonia's parents that surgery had been successful and that I expected the girl's complete recovery in a matter of days. Candelario arrived to relieve me for the graveyard shift.
When I left the hospital toward midnight, there was a teenage girl in new blue denim jeans and a powder-blue top standing beneath the neon sign outside. She had a pretty face, light skin, and the dirty-blond hair of a true rubiecita. Our eyes met and she walked over to me. Casually overlooking the mark on my cheek, she handed me a sack. "It looked like you were never going to get a break, so I brought you something."
Inside the sack was a malted milk and a sandwich. "Where did you get this?"
"At the Habana Libre cafeteria."
"They let you in?"
"A friend picked it up for me, a foreigner."
"Thank you. Let me pay you."
"I won't take your money, doctor. That girl you operated on tonight is my closest cousin."
"Please, share this with me."
"No thanks. I already ate."
I bit into the sandwich: ham and cheese on bread that wasn't stale.
"You're a lifesaver. I haven't tasted anything in twelve hours."
We talked about the heat while I finished the sandwich and the malta. Then she looked me in the eyes and said, "Pardon me, doctor, but a girlfriend told me you have a clinic where you can do the HIV test and keep the results secret."
I looked over my shoulder — nobody. "Yes, but when it's necessary I recommend treatment and counseling."
"I'm not going to one of those sanitoriums."
"You're getting ahead of yourself. My polyclinic is on 12 y 23 in Vedado. There are open consultations this Saturday and Sunday from 8:00 to 5:00. I close for an hour at midday."
"I'll see you tomorrow then," she said. The girl walked off into the night.
* * *
Back at the attic, I flipped on the light and said to El Ché, "The sun through the French doors has been sucking the color from your face."
El Ché replied, "You look like hell yourself. Even if there's not much to eat, you should at least keep clean-shaven."
"I can't buy a razor anywhere. And who are you to talk, barbudo?"
"My beard is different. It's symbolic."
"I'll say: totemic."
I flipped on Radio Reloj. "Economic aggression from North American reactionaries has not dampened the spirits of the volunteer brigades picking cucumbers in Varadero ..."
There are certain advantages to occupying the third floor, like fewer encounters with the CDR and other people of the street. It's quieter up en el tercer piso and cooler in the breezes from the Florida Straits, and although there are relocados downstairs, none trudge overhead. For the past few years, I have resigned myself to every six months seeing all that sustains me — the real value of my salary, my ration of food and coffee, my allowance of sex, and the square footage of the house I can call my own — cut in half. I have a galley kitchen where I make coffee (when there is coffee) and slice whatever scraps of vegetables I can find on the bolsa negra with a dull scalpel salvaged from the pediátrico. The bathroom is tiny with a toilet, a basin under an iron tap, and a shower three feet square. In the living room there's a braided rug where I throw my dirty work clothes, three walls of books, and a sofa where I sleep beneath a poster of El Ché. I got rid of the bed after Elena left. The saving grace of this attic — added during pre-revolutionary days less for the servant-occupant's enjoyment than to appease the façade of proportion at the time — is a pair of French doors that open onto a shallow balcony facing the sea: a living blue movie where imagination paints ninety-mile-away views of that most unobtainable peninsula. On good days I get up and put Beny Moré on my father's old tocadisco. I open the French doors and let the ships' whistles blow in from Havana Bay. On bad days I awaken too early, hours before dawn, and stay on the sofa with my eyes squeezed shut but getting none of sleep's reprieve.
I lit a cigarette, brand Popular: black tobacco packed in sweet rice paper, ten cents a pack on the ration card, but that's for just one pack a week, and everybody who smokes Populares craves at least a pack a day. Now two packs of Popular go for an American dollar on the black market, so nobody who gives up smoking ever surrenders his weekly ration. Most people I know who have recently quit did it so they can go on eating. Coffee can help the headaches, when there is coffee. I use the grounds four or five times, dehydrating them in the window between infusions and preserving them with a bit of plastic in the refrigerator. Then again, coffee can be the cause. Neurons become greedy for caffeine, and when abruptly there is no more caffeine they become confused and send messages to the pain center. Coffee can hurt or coffee can be a remedy. When I was interning thirty-hour triples, I could try to plow through the migraine, but lately the pain has been making me dizzy. There's no more aspirin or ibuprofen. I'd have to steal it from the pediátrico, and that would mean directly from the patients' provisions. I won't stoop that low. Not yet.
There was no coffee, not even tea, but as a psychosomatic tactic I got an empty cup from the kitchen and took imaginary sips. Sometimes it stems the migraine. Every day is pervaded by headaches. Hunger headaches, heat headaches, just missed the bus and have to wait four more hours for the next one headaches. Berliners on la tele chiseling chunks of concrete to sell to American collectors headaches. Desperation headaches. Headaches of locusts pealing invisibly from saw grass and palm, of shrill locusts flying smack into your eye and crunching under your feet. Headaches that make your jaw ache. Headaches that begin between midbrain and cerebellum and rise, pausing to rock the pons, and shudder back down the spinal cord through the medulla oblongata. Headaches that settle into one shoulder or the other. Headaches that make you vomit. Headaches that make music, their very own music, broadcasting on low-frequency radio waves that shake the bowels of passersby.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Havana Lunar"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Robert Arellano.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
14 August 1992,
31 July 1992,
12 August 1979,
1 August 1992,
2 August 1992,
3 August 1992,
12 August 1989,
4 August 1992,
5 August 1992,
6 August 1992,
12 August 1980,
8 August 1992,
9 August 1992,
10 August 1992,
11 August 1992,
12 August 1992,
13 August 1992,
15 August 1992,
16 August 1992,
12 August 1979,
18 August 1992,
22 August 1992,
23 August 1992,
24 August 1992,
E-book Extras,
Excerpt from Havana Libre,
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